Mormon Doctrine

Capital punishment and blood atonement

The second edition deleted the entry that said what the doctrine meant in law, and kept the entry that said the doctrine was true.

The 1958 first edition carried an entry headed Capital Punishment and a second headed Death Penalty that pointed at it. Neither is in the second edition. What is in the second edition is Blood Atonement Doctrine, which the revision left standing. Reading the three together shows what the deletion actually removed — not the doctrine, but the sentence connecting it to the statute book.

The entry that was deleted

Capital Punishment cross-referenced to Adultery, Apostasy, Blood Atonement Doctrine, Murderers, and opened without preamble.

In keeping with the doctrine of blood atonement, capital punishment is ordained of God as the just, proper, and necessary penalty to be imposed for the commission of certain grievous crimes. It is part of the gospel itself and is not something that appertains only to some lesser order of things.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Capital Punishment”, 1958 first edition

Execution by firing squad, which Utah offered condemned prisoners for over a century when no other American state did, is the practical matter behind that sentence, and it is routinely read outside the church as a survival of this teaching. The entry is the one a reader looking the question up would have reached for. It went in 1966, along with the one-line Death Penalty cross-reference that led to it.

The entry that stayed

Blood Atonement Doctrine survives in both editions, and it does two things in sequence. It denies the practice in terms that leave no room —

There is not one historical instance of so-called blood atonement in this dispensation.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Blood Atonement Doctrine”, 1966 second edition, p. 66

— and then teaches the doctrine:

But under certain circumstances there are some serious sins for which the cleansing of Christ does not operate, and the law of God is that men must then have their own blood shed to atone for their sins. Murder, for instance, is one of these sins; hence we find the Lord commanding capital punishment.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Blood Atonement Doctrine”, 1966 second edition, p. 66

The entry's own resolution is jurisdictional. The doctrine “can only be practiced in its fulness in a day when the civil and ecclesiastical laws are administered in the same hands”; it “was not and could not be practiced in this dispensation”, except — and the exception is the point — that “persons who understood its provisions could and did use their influence to get a form of capital punishment written into the laws of the various states of the union so that the blood of murderers could be shed.”

That sentence is in the second edition. So the deleted Capital Punishment entry was not removed because its claim had been abandoned; the claim is still there, one entry away, under a heading a reader looking up the death penalty would never think to check.

Where it comes from

The doctrine is not McConkie's. It was preached from the pulpit in Salt Lake City in the 1850s, most sharply during the Mormon Reformation of 1856–57, and it was printed. Nine discourses in the Journal of Discourses bear on it — three that teach it, four that state the premise it rests on, and two that pull the other way, including Charles W. Penrose denying the doctrine outright from the same stand in 1884.

Where it stands

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rejects blood atonement and states that it was never church practice: the atonement of Jesus Christ is held sufficient for all sin that can be repented of. On capital punishment its published position is two sentences long, and it declines the question.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regards the question of whether and in what circumstances the state should impose capital punishment as a matter to be decided solely by the prescribed processes of civil law. We neither promote nor oppose capital punishment.

“Capital Punishment”, official statement, Church Newsroom

Neither of those is the position of the deleted 1958 entry, which called the death penalty “part of the gospel itself”. And neither is quite the position of the entry the second edition kept.